Tag Archives: music

It’s a punk show in someone’s garage – no one I know. No one anyone knows, from what I can tell. We shimmy under the broken door, our backs almost scrapping the splintered wood.

There are two couches and fake flowers hanging from the ceiling. There’s a glitter skeleton grinning from the rafters, all shimmer and plastic. The walls are different colors, covered in posters or paint or an odd mix of the two. It is the kind of house that fascinates – that traps, that keeps. Not harmful, but purposeful. Almost like an old-world mother, whispering secrets in a dusty language no one else quite remembers. I catch pieces through the heat.

Have you ever been so in love that it hurt to breathe? Like your heart had started overwhelming your lungs because it beats so fast and so hard when you see him.

So I crawl into the house because my heart is in there, square in the palm of his hands, and he’s holding a bass guitar.

The house doesn’t creak. I think it moans, low and slow, underneath the booming music. I can feel it, the moaning and the music, but I can’t hear anything. Or I can hear everything and it’s a wall of noise, full-blown. No one’s lips are moving slow enough for me to read.

It’s nothing and it’s everything. I can’t explain it. Music is often just outside of my grasp – my ears don’t work well enough.

Sweaty kids line the garage in a C shape, sometimes crossing in front of me to dance. They pump their fists and scream words to songs that I don’t know, that I can’t hear. But I can watch and I can feel my boyfriend’s beat vibrating in my joints and I can write poetry in the space where music lives for everyone else.

The night ends. The house lets me go, gently, and I almost don’t believe it will be there if I try to find it again. It’s impermanent but eternal – more of an idea than a physical location. Dirt collects under my toes as we wander out.

I carry his bass. He carries everything else – the summer heat, the amp, my heart. The night is electric and I’ve never felt more alive.

I truly believe you’re either born a poet or forged into one – but I can’t decide where that leaves me.

I’ve been a poet longer than almost anything else – my love for poetry just barely predates my trauma and the subsequent illnesses it wrought. Poetry was my coping mechanism long before I understood what I had survived. Words just make sense in a way that numbers and figures never quite managed.

April is National Poetry Month, intended to expose the nation to the beauty and calamity of words. Poetry is where I began. My first poem was published in Highlights magazine before I was old enough to type. It was about the wind. There was an owl. That’s all I remember. But I dictated the poem to my mother and I was so proud when she printed it out. Proud, but nervous. Once it was sent to the magazine, it wasn’t my poem anymore. But we have the print in my closet, locked away under other little memories deemed soft enough to treasure.

And so I was a poet.

I won an award at Tattered Covers. It was expected that the winners would read their work aloud but I couldn’t, not in the slightest, so I trembled behind my mother instead. She read about the wind and I shook, face red, my words so separate from myself that I could barely stand to hear them. Then the crowd applauded! And suddenly the fear and dread melted into something different, something I have struggled to define in the years since.

It was like being heard for the first time.

I hope I smiled then, but it’d be true to form if I had cried instead.

They Could’ve Been Dancing

we’re packed into a storage house
past its prime, plastered with graffiti and
band stickers and my friend’s glitter
bombs from five shows ago that never
washed away

I don’t know any of the songs but
that boy has my heart in one hand
and my hand in the other and
I’m shouting beneath my skin, eyes open,
watching the men grab each other
and sway

it’s beautiful
tangentially speaking
as if music, like weeds, grew
around a structure and said